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Friday, 28 April 2017

We have just launched Version 5 of the ForgeRock Identity Platform with numerous enhancements for DevOps friendliness. I have been meaning to jump into the world of DevOps for some time so the new release afforded a great opportunity to do just that.

As always with this blog I am going to step through a fully worked example. In this case I am using IBM Bluemix however it could just as easily have been AWS, Azure. GKE or any service that supports Kubernetes. By the end of this blog you will have a containerised instance of ForgeRock OpenAM and OpenDJ running on Bluemix deployed using Kubernetes. First off we will cover the basics.

DevOps Basics

There are many tutorials out there introducing dev ops that do a great job so I am not going to repeat those here I will point you towards the excellent ForgeRock Platform 5 DevOps guide which also takes you through DevOps deployment step by step into Minikube or GKE:

What I want to do briefly is touch on some of the key ideas that really helped me to understand DevOps. I do not claim to be an expert but I think I am beginning to piece it all together:

12 Factor Applications: Best practices for developing applications, superbly summarised here this is why we need containers and DevOps.

Docker: Technology for building, deploying and managing containers.

Containers: A minimal operating system and components necessary to host an application. Traditionally we host apps in virtual machines with full blown operating systems whereas containers cut all of that down to just what you need for the application you are going to run.

In docker containers are built from Dockerfiles which are effectively recipes for building containers from different components. e.g. a recipe for a container running Tomcat.

Container Registry: A place where built containers can be uploaded to, managed, downloaded and deployed from. You could have a registry running locally, cloud environments will also typically have registries they will use to retrieve containers at deployment time.

Kubernetes: An engine for orchestrating deployment of containers. Because containers are very minimal, they need to have extra elements provisioning such as volume storage, secrets storage and configuration. In addition when you deploy any application you need load balancing and numerous other considerations. Kubernetes is a language for defining all of these requirements and an engine for implementing them all.

In cloud environments such as AWS, Azure and IBM Bluemix that support Kubernetes this effectively means that Kubernetes will manage the configuration of the cloud infrastructure for you in effect abstracting away all of the usual configuration you have to do specific to these environments.

Storage is a good example, in Kubernetes you can define persistent volume claims, this is effectively a way of asking for storage. Now with Kubernetes you do not need to be concerned with the specifics of how this storage is provisioned. Kubernetes will do that for you regardless of whether you deploy onto AWS, Azure, IBM Bluemix.

This enables automated and simplified deployment of your application to any deployment environment that supports Kubernetes! If you want to move from one environment to another just point your script at that environment! More so Kubernetes gives you a consistent deployment management and monitoring dashboard across all of these environments!

Helm: An engine for scripting Kubernetes deployments and operations. The ForgeRock platform uses this for DevOps deployment. It simply enables scripting of Kubernetes functionality and configuration of things like environment variables that may change between deployments.

The above serves as a very brief introduction to the world of DevOps and helps to set the scene for our deployment.

If you want to following along with this guide please get yourself a paid IBM Bluemix account alternatively if you want to use GKE or Minikube ( for local deployment ) take a look at the superb ForgeRock DevOps Guide. I will likely cover off Azure and AWS deployment in later blogs however everything we talk about here will still be relevant for those and other cloud environments as after all that is the whole point of Kubernetes!In Part 2 we will get started by installing some prerequisites and building our first docker containers.

Tuesday, 11 April 2017

I attended the Starling Bank Hackathon this weekend and had a great time, I will shortly be writing a longer blog post to talk all about it but before that I briefly wanted to blog about a little bit of code that might be really helpful to anyone building IDM workflows.

The External Rest Endpoint

OpenIDM has an REST API that effectively allows you to invoke external REST services hosted anywhere. You might use this for example to call out to an identity verification service as part of a registration workflow and I made good use of it at the hackathon.With the following piece of code you can create some JSON and call out to a REST service outside of OpenIDM:

Sunday, 2 April 2017

ForgeRock Identity Management includes an OOTB workflow engine based on BPMN (Business Process Model & Notation). This isn't unique, most identity management solutions have some form of workflow engine. However in my experience they are typically based on some proprietary technology and/or very painful to work with.I have recently had to build some workflows for various customer Proof of Concepts and I am really impressed by how quickly you can pull something together so I wanted to write up a blog entry.

So in this blog we are going to use a brand new instance of IDM (installed locally) and create a simple request and approval workflow which we will then test.I am going to use the Eclipse Activiti plugin for this, there are other BPMN editors however I am going to stick with what I know for now. I am also not going to spend much time talking about BPMN beyond what we need to build a meaningful workflow. Much more information is available here. In the spirit of this blog I am just going to get on with it and walk you through the basic steps to build and test a simple workflow.Additionally, the workflow samples that ship with IDM are a brilliant place to start. I highly recommend taking a look at them and using them as the basis of your workflows until you get comfortable building them yourself.

Getting Started

I am going to assume you have an installation of IDM already, if not check out my IDM beginners series. IDM ships with a built in version of the Activiti workflow engine: https://www.activiti.org/. We are going to use the free Eclipse Activiti Workflow Designer to build our workflows. Firstly, download and install the Eclipse IDE.When you have Eclipse installed, fire it up and navigate to help-> install new software:

Wait for the installation process to complete, now that is all out of the way. Lets get started!

Create a New Project

Navigate to File -> New Project:

Then select General -> Project (we do not need an Activiti Project):

Give your project a name:

And press Finish.

Building a New Workflow

Right click on the new project, select New File:

Give it a name similar to the following:

.bpmn20.xml is the convention we use for workflow files in IDM.

Finally right click on our new workflow, select Open With and Other...

Finally right click on our new workflow, select Open With and Other...

And select Activiti Diagram Editor.

Ok, you should now have a blank canvas that looks a bit like this:

Lets get started. First thing we need is a Start Event. Drag one over from the menu on the right and drop it somewhere on the workflow canvas.

Now, we need some workflow steps. As we are building a simple request and approval workflow so we probably need:

A step to actually create a request for something (that is actually our StartEvent we just created).

A step to gather some information and determine who the request needs to go to for approval.

A step for the actual approval.

A step for processing the result. Typically you also want to send an email containing the response. In fact, we probably need two steps here, one for success and one for failure.

We will build the workflow steps and connect them together first, before implementing the actual logic. Select a Script Task from the menu on the right and drag it on to our canvas.

You should now have something like this:

We probably want to give our Script Task a name, click on it and give it a new name:

Just replace the Name value with something appropriate:

We also need to make sure that all Script Tasks have a script defined so that IDM can parse them successfully. The easiest way to do this is to add a simple logging statement to the task. Select the Process Request task again. then the Main config tab and add some simple logging script:

Now you can use either javascript or groovy for scripting. I tend to use groovy but that is just personal choice.

Click Details and you can see the form we created earlier! You can enter a request and justification but do not hit Start, because right now nothing will happen.

More Workflow Logic

Ok, so we can make a request now, but it doesn't go to anyone. Let's fix that, there are a few things to do here. Firstly we need to gather some more information about the requestor for the approver. Select the StartEvent then Main config and set Initiator as "initiatorId":

Select the Process Request task and enter the following script as groovy into main Config then save your work.

All we are doing here is retrieving the user data for the initiating user and setting it as variables in the workflow process. We are also assigning the user who will approve the request (simply as a static Id here but you can easily make this dynamic, for example assign the task to a group or to a manager - I may cover this in a later blog).

A few more steps, we need to set the assignee for the approval task. Select the Approve Request task and enter the following for assignee:

We also need to configure the approval form as below to show the data we just collected:

We also need to add the request fields the user just filled in:

We also need to add an approvalResult, to the form. This field is a little different as it is an enum:

Because this field is an enumeration we need to add some form values for the user to choose, press New:

And configure the Form Value configuration as below and press OK:

Do the same for "rejected", and you should end up with the following:

Save your work.

Back to IDM

Again, copy the workflow file into IDM. Now logout, login as a user and select the workflow and populate the request:

Press Start. All being well you should see confirmation the workflow process has been started. Now log out and log back in as openidm-admin, you should see that there is a request to be approved on the dashboard:

And if you select Details, you can see the request itself and the additional information we put into it, as well as our approval drop down:

However as before do not click Complete just yet, as we need to actually make this do something.

Final Workflow Logic

Back to the workflow editor, lets take a look at the exclusive gateway we added a bit earlier:

So what we need now is some logic, based on the approval result to send the workflow to the right place. Click on the flow to the Approved task:

Take a look at the Main config, and specifically the Condition field:

Enter the following:

${approvalResult=='approved'}

Do something similar for the Rejected flow:

${approvalResult=='rejected'}

You will notice these two conditions are based on the enum we defined earlier, depending on the selection made by the approver we flow will go to either the Approved or Rejected task.

Now lets finish the workflow, select the Approved task and Main config and Script, enter the following:

This bit of script simply uses the IDM notification engine to let the user know that their request has been approved.

Save your work for the last time and copy the work flow into IDM.

Back to IDM for the Last Time

So now, we should have a complete workflow.

Login to IDM as jbloggs and make a request.

Login to IDM as openidm-admin to approve the request.

Finally, log back in as jbloggs and you should see a notification the request has been approved.

We have only looked at the "happy" flow here, I leave the rejected flow as a task for the interested reader.And thats it, very basic workflow but hopefully you can begin to see what is possible. In future blogs I'll look at actually at assigning a role based on the approval and also enabling a request drop down dynamically. I really just wanted to give a taster of what can be done in a relatively short time frame with IDM's workflow engine.